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The Politics of Sleaze Reporting : a Critical Overview of the Ethical Debate in the British Press of the 19905

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The Politics of Sleaze Reporting : a Critical Overview of the Ethical Debate in the British Press of the 19905 THE POLITICS OF SLEAZE REPORTING : A CRITICAL OVERVIEW OF THE ETHICAL DEBATE IN THE BRITISH PRESS OF THE 19905 Richard Keeblel Evelyn Waugh's “Scoop” is a glorious send-up of journalistic practices which, though published in 1938, still holds true for today. Sociologists may Write Weighty theoretical tomes about the manufacture of the news consensus and the culture of the spectacle. But Waugh summed all this up in his Wonderfully Witty narrative. Here, for instance, in his description of “the fabulous” journalist Wenlock Jakes : “Once .Takes went out to cover a revolution in one of the Balkan capitals. He overslept in his carriage, woke up at the wrong station, didn°t know any different, go out, went straight to an hotel and cabled off a thousand-Word story about barricades in the streets, flaming churches... Well, they were pretty surprised at his office getting a story like that from the wrong country but they trusted Jakes and splashed it in six national nevvspapers. That day every special in Europe got orders to rush to the new revolution. They arrived in shoals. Everything seemed quiet enough but it Was as much 1 Senior Lecturer in journalism at City University, London. Recherches en communication, n° 9, (1998). _ RICHARD KEEBLE ,___ __ _ _ as their jobs were worth to say so, with Jakes filing a thousand words of blood and thunder a day. So they chimed in too”. It is worth bearing in mind Waugh”s delightful descriptions of newspapers” abilities to concoct the news since in the current debate over joumalistic ethics nothing is quite what it seems. A conventional overview of the ethical debate might run something like this : during the 1980s the Press Council, set up in July 1963 to oversee the press standards, failed to win the confidence of politicians, newspaper managements and the National Union of Journalists. Following a spate of controversies over press intrusions into private grief, the Thatcher government set up the Calcutt committee to investigate the possible introduction of a privacy law. Predictably the committee”s eventual backing for the privacy laws drew howls of protest from the massed ranks of Fleet Street editors and in an attempt to ward off legislation the industry wound up the Press Council and set up in its place the Press Complaints Commission with a beefed up Code of Practice. In January 1993 a second report from Calcutt proposed new offences carrying maximum fines of £5,000 for invasions of privacy and the use of surveillance and bugging devices in certain cases. The Major government reacted favourably and later in the year proposed the introduction of a privacy law. The government was more sceptical of ideas promoted by the Labour backbencher, Clive Solely, for enforcing a statutory code on press accuracy. Similarly, a proposal from the National Heritage select committee for the industry to set up a voluntary body with powers to fine offending newspapers failed to win the support of the government or prominent journalists. In November 1993, peeping Tom photographs taken secretly of a reclining Princess Diana working out at a gym and published in the Sunday Mirror and Mirror refuelled the privacy debate. A Sunday Times sting operation in July 1994 against two Conservative MPS Graham Riddick and David Tredinnick, which revealed them receiving £1,000 from a journalist to ask questions in Parliament, provoked more controversy. Then in October 1994, the Guardian began its own long campaign to expose sleaze among Conservative MPS taking cash handouts from lobbyists in return for asking parliamentary questions. Debates over newspaper ethics rose to fever pitch as an unprecedented number of ministerial resignations occurred in the three years following John Major°s 1992 election victory and his THE PoL1'r1cs_ on SLEAZE REPORTING _ 73 launch of a “Back to Basics” moral crusade, most of them following “scandalous” revelations in the press. In September 1997, the reputation of the media suffered a further blow following the paparazzis° alleged involvement in the death of Princess Diana in a car accident. Fears grew amongst journalists that privacy legislation would enter Britain “through the back door” with the incorporation of a European Commission directive on data protection. But in January this year the government pledged to protect the media from a law giving individuals right of access to personal information held on them in computer files and other data bases. And in recent debates over the Human Rights Bill the government has made clear its opposition to privacy legislation (just at the time when some prominent journalists --such as the editor of the Guardian- were beginning to argue in its favour if balanced by changes in the libel law). Now let°s look behind the headlines. Missing from the conventional overview is the political context. And here the complex series of factors which configured around the collapse of the Soviet Union are crucial. During the Cold War, the constraints imposed by the national security state meant that the elite had to stand relatively united in the face of the common enemy (the Russian Bear), the danger it posed being always exaggerated. Let°s take a specific example. The security specialist for the Daily Express, Chapman Pincher, has described how during the early Sixties he attended a conference at a Washington hotel where he learnt that President Kennedy had recently indulged in lengthy “gang- bangs” with a “bevy of nubile girls”. In a letter to the Daily Telegraph (18 February 1997), Pincher wrote: “As these events had gone unreported in the media, I asked some of the American journalists at the conference if they knew about them. Some did; others were neither surprised nor interested. They could see no point in sullying the reputation of their President who was also chief of staff of the armed forces at a dangerous time in the Cold War. That too was the view of Lord Beaverbrook, owner of the Daily Express, and its editor”. Precisely. The Cold War can, indeed, be viewed in part as an ideological tool serving to reinforce the power of the dominant elite and constrain the dominant discourse within closely defined parameters. With the crumbling of the Berlin Wall everything changed. The common enemy disappeared and elite members were left bickering amongst 24 _ _ _ __ _ RICHARD KEEBLE themselves (though the 1991 Gulf war was an attempt to redefine old Cold War moral certainties and simplifications within a new Western civilisation v. barbaric, new Hitler Saddam frame). The ideological constraints imposed by the demands of the national security state during the Cold War were a kind of cork holding down all the inter- elite conflicts. Once the Cold War had faded these elite conflicts and corruption scandal burst out of the bottle (indeed, on a global scale). In Britain, newspapers, pursuing a reactionary moral/political agenda, helped provide the theatre in which these elite squabbles (often involving invasions of privacy) could be played out. The conventional view of the ethical debate is ultimately based on notions of the free press which stress the essential adversarial relationship between politicians and the media. But as Franklin argues : Relations between politicians and the media should not be understood as simply adversarial. They may on occasion pursue different goals but this occurs within an agreed framework which offers potential benefit to both groups... Politicians” and journalists' mutual reliance prompts a continual adjustment or “adaptation” of their relationships to ensure continuity despite the conflict and co-operation which characterise theml. ln place of the free press myth and the accompanying myth of self regulation, the critical analysis provided here highlights the complex propaganda function of the press. It is obviously not the only function of the press : it competes with the entertainment, ideological and informational functions for prominence. Yet it is easily marginalised. A superficial viewing of the statistics might suggest that the London-based mass selling press was performing its vital role as the fearless investigative Fourth Estate challenging the government between 1992 and 1995 and exposing corruption. Over this period, there were 14 resignations on grounds of scandal : this out of a total government list (Commons and Lords) of about 130. About half the cases involved sexual activities and about half financial irregularities. Virtually all were first revealed in the press. In all, over the five years between 1990 and 1995, when “sleaze” stories dominated the news there were 34 Conservative, one Liberal Democrat and four Labour 1 B. FRANKUN, Pddrargffsrg pdzafds, Lddddn, Edward Amdid, 1994, p. is. _ THB PoL1T_1cs or sLE.AzE REPQRTING j 75 scandals ; of these 39, at least a quarter, involved sex. Not surprisingly the press lapped up every “sordid” detail, every spurned mistress's candid revelation, every call girl's shocking exposé. A study of parliamentary reporting in the nationals between 1990 and 1995 found that “scandal and personal misconduct” was the third most frequently reported topic, way ahead of major issues such as health (eighth), education (tenth), social services (35th) and race (38th)l. Yet the Conservative Party was in a state of dramatic decline from its highwater mark under Mrs Thatcher in the 1980s. The newspapers through their ownership patterns are closely integrated into the dominant economic structures of society? And over this period they were in no way following a political agenda that sought the removal of the Tories. With the significant exception of the Gaardianfs exposés of Neil Hamilton and Jonathan Aitken, nor were they engaged in fearless investigative reporting. To a certain extent, they were concerned to expose hypocrisy. As Brian McNair has commented : When politicians who on conference platforms preach about the social evils presented by single rnotherhood, or who choose to campaign around “back to basics” moral values, turn out to be unfaithful to their wives, or neglecting their illegitimate children, the voters have a right to know.
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